Lala Lajpat Rai, “Hindu Minorityhood,” and Nationalism in India

An influential leader of the Hindu Mahasabha in the mid-1920s, Lala Lajpat Rai is often viewed as having laid the basic ideological groundwork for Savarkar’s Hindutva nationalist ideology. This paper explores Lajpat Rai’s thought independently of any teleological links to Hindutva and asks what is illuminated by viewing Lajpat Rai as a member not just of the all-India Hindu ‘majority’ but of the Hindu ‘minority’ in Punjab. While not a proponent of Hindutva, Rai remained deeply attached to the notion of an all-India Hindu majority. As a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, he organized a militant Hindu politics that opposed Muslim political demands which he believed encroached on the legitimate rights of the Hindu majority. Lajpat Rai’s advocacies for the Hindu minority in Muslim-majority Punjab often stoked fears about designs of Muslim domination at the all-India level and fueled the militant Hindu politics he organized through the Mahasabha. Yet Rai’s attachment to an all-India Hindu majority co-existed with his desire to inaugurate a ‘secular’ Indian nation-state, which opposed dreams of the Hindu Raj, sought to grant equal citizenship, respected religious and cultural diversity, and remained willing to grant proportional Muslim representation. This paper argues that Rai’s positionality as a member of the Hindu ‘minority’ in Punjab not only fueled his fears of Muslim domination, driving a paranoid Hindu militancy, but simultaneously also endowed Rai with an ability to sympathize with Muslim minority fears of Hindu domination, leading him to espouse a secular Indian nationalism that could consider Muslim ‘reservations’ in proportion to their demographic strength. These simultaneous subjective positions of “minorityhood” and “majorityhood” together produced a Hindu militancy and secular-pluralist inclusiveness, which existed in deep tension with each other.